Sophie McBain in The Guardian:

In 2021, the psychologist and writer Kathryn Paige Harden co-authored a paper outlining her research into the genetic patterns linked to a higher risk of developing substance abuse problems or engaging in risk-taking behaviour, such as having unprotected sex or committing crime. The paper referred to the genetics of “traits related to self-regulation and addiction”, but Harden thought of herself as studying the genetics of sin.

Harden is a professor at the University of Texas and the author of a previous book, The Genetic Lottery, on how our knowledge of genetics should shape our views on meritocracy. She once received a letter from a man who has been in prison since he was 16 for kidnapping and sexually assaulting a woman. “What would drive a boy to do such a thing?” he asked her. Her new book is a heartfelt, subtly argued response to his question, an attempt to outline how our expanding knowledge of what makes people do bad things – the interplay of our inherited tendencies and our life circumstances – should influence how we assign moral responsibility and blame.

More here.

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Ruby Eastwood at the Dublin Review of Books:

The Life of Violet brings together three interconnected short stories written by Woolf in 1907, at the age of twenty-five. They show her beginning to think about something she would return to throughout her career: how to tell the story of a woman’s life. Together, the stories form a spirited, lively mock-biography of her friend Violet Dickinson, a woman famous and beloved in Woolf’s aristocratic circles for her height (6ft 2in) and the humour and kindness she lavished on her friends. She was, from all documentary evidence, a remarkably nice woman, whom Woolf was infatuated with for a time.

The first story, ‘Friendships Gallery’, is a wry, fantastical potted biography, beginning with the birth of Violet, ‘the Giantess’, into a conventional Christian household. It traces her unstoppable growth into young womanhood, culminating in her first dance – though before she goes, her pious aunt issues a cautionary reminder: ‘You are neither beautiful nor wealthy, nor, for anything I can see, in any way attractive; God in his infinite goodness has caused you to grow at least six inches higher than you should grow, and if you are not to be a Maypole of Derision you must see to it that you are a Beacon of Godliness.’

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Gemma Sieff at Artforum:

Transcription is a work of art for a new age of mechanical reproduction, a meditation on imperfect facsimile. Its cover features an embossed finger- and thumb-printed brick with rounded corners, in my judgment an iPhone-shaped Rosetta stone as satisfyingly tactile as braille. It signals the degree to which the novel is preoccupied with the absolute centricity of the smartphone in contemporary life, as a crutch, an addiction, a lifeline, a miracle . . . whatever is the opposite of a vestigial limb.

The book is organized as a triptych, each section set in a different city and centered around some kind of face-off. “Hotel Providence” sees the unnamed Lerner stand-in traveling to Rhode Island by Amtrak, to interview his ninety-year-old mentor Thomas, “among the world’s most renowned thinkers about art and technology.” Masked up, the narrator sits in one of those backward seats that are “facing the past,” as his ten-year-old daughter Eva refers to them. She, we learn, has been refusing to go to school; her “best friend has kind of left her for another girl,” the narrator will later explain to Thomas, or maybe she is protesting “the disasters of the world. Everything with Covid. The sky orange with Canadian wildfire smoke. There was that day of floods, we were almost swept away on the expressway. There is the war—the wars . . . ”

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Freddie deBoer in FdB:

“Show, don’t tell” is among the most repeated piece of writing advice in the English language, up there with hatred for the passive voices, disdain for adverbs, and endorsements of George Orwell’s dusty old essay full of maxims that probably made sense in 1946. It’s a mantra drilled into MFA workshop participants, stamped into the margins of manuscripts, and recited by well-meaning teachers from middle school to graduate seminars. And in its dogmatic form, it could be used to pathologize some of the greatest prose ever written. Like a lot of writing advice, “show, don’t tell” has a legitimate kernel of truth; like almost all writing advice, I think its actual utility for inexperienced writers is near zero.

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Olivia Farrar in Harvard Magazine:

1. What’s the most common mistake we make when we disagree?

Trying to win. We go in wanting to persuade the other person they’re wrong and we’re right. That usually backfires. Often, what is underneath is a phenomenon psychologists call “naive realism:” we assume our view of the world is basically correct and objective, and we don’t notice how much our background, incentives, and mood shape what we see. So when someone disagrees, we don’t think, “I might be missing something.” We think something’s wrong with them.

2. What practical shifts would make others more receptive to opposing views?

First, say out loud that you want to learn. Don’t assume people can tell you’re curious. Use clear phrases like, “That’s how I see it, but I’d like to understand other perspectives.” The research shows that even a couple of sentences like this—without changing your actual argument—makes the other side see you as more reasonable, trustworthy, and worth talking to again. Second, use the H.E.A.R. framework when you make your case: hedge your claims (“most of the time,” “in many cases”); emphasize where you agree; acknowledge their view before you disagree; and reframe to the positive (fewer “don’t,” “can’t,” “never” and more “I’d appreciate,” “what would help”). You’re not changing your position, but you’re showing that you are leaving some mental space for their arguments. And receptiveness in language tends to be reciprocated.

In experiments, people who get brief training in [the H.E.A.R framework] are rated by disagreeing counterparts as more trustworthy, objective, and desirable as teammates, even on very divisive topics…Teaching people what to say works better than only urging them to be more empathetic or humble, because it gives them concrete moves they can use in the moment.

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Man the Toolmaker

Man the toolmaker, tooluser,
son of the burning quests
fixed with roaming forearms,
hands attached to the forearms,
fingers put on those hands,
a thumb to face any finger—
hands cunning with knives, leather, wood,
        hands for twisting, weaving, shaping—
Man the flint grinder, iron and bronze welder,
        smoothing mud into hut walls,
        smoothing reinforced concrete into
        bridges, breakwaters, office buildings—
two hands projected into vast claws, giant hammers,
        into diggers, haulers, lifters.
The clamps of the big steam shovel? Man’s two hands:
the motor hurling man into high air? man’s two hands:
        the screws of his skulled head
        joining the screws of his hands,
pink convolutions transmitting to white knuckles
        waves, signals, buttons, sparks—
        man with hands for loving and strangling,
        man with the open palm of living handshakes,
man with the closed nails of the fist of combat—
        these hands of man—where to? what next?

by Carl Sandburg
From Harvest Poems— 1910-1960
Harcourt Brace, 1960

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Oscar Rey de Castro at The Crossover Project:

Every April 1st, the world agrees to lie to each other. Not the dangerous kind — not the kind that topples governments or breaks marriages. The small kind. The kind that makes you check if your coffee is actually salt. The kind that makes a grown adult Google “did NASA really discover a second moon” before breakfast.

And every year, someone falls for it.

That person feels a flash of something familiar. Embarrassment, maybe. A sting. A quick inventory: How did I not see that coming? Then — usually — laughter. The room laughs with them, not at them. And something shifts. Not dramatically. Not consciously. But something in the architecture of trust recalibrates.

What if that recalibration is the whole point?

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Charlie Wood in Quanta:

Some 30 years ago, the mathematician Peter Shor(opens a new tab) took a niche physics project — the dream of building a computer based on the counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics — and shook the world.

Shor worked out a way for quantum computers to swiftly solve a couple of math problems that classical computers could complete only after many billions of years. Those two math problems happened to be the ones that secured the then-emerging digital world. The trustworthiness of nearly every website, inbox, and bank account rests on the assumption that these two problems are impossible to solve. Shor’s algorithm proved that assumption wrong.

For 30 years, Shor’s algorithm has been a security threat in theory only. Physicists initially estimated that they would need a colossal quantum machine with billions of qubits — the elements used in quantum calculations — to run it. That estimate has come down drastically over the years, falling recently to a million qubits. But it has still always sat comfortably beyond the modest capabilities of existing quantum computers, which typically have just hundreds of qubits.

However, two different groups of researchers have just announced advances that notably reduce the gap between theoretical estimates and real machines.

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Miles Kellerman at Aeon:

The global financial system is a colossal factory containing an endless web of information assembly lines. Every time you tap your card on a payment terminal, whether it’s for a coffee on the way to work or a new vacuum cleaner, you are sending a new informational signal to that factory. Like raw material, that signal is then loaded on a conveyor belt where it is checked and modified by your bank, the seller’s bank, a payment processor, card network, and other intermediaries as it proceeds. The assembly line may be relatively short for cups of coffee. For more complicated purchases, however, like mortgages and stocks, the transactional chain can become remarkably complex.

But not all transactions take place in this factory. There are, in fact, entirely separate payment networks that operate outside the confines of state-regulated information assembly lines. The Chinese refer to them as feiqian (‘flying money’). Arabic speakers prefer the term hawala, whereas the Indian diaspora operates through a practice called hundi. In English, we have developed an ominous phrase to capture these various informal networks: underground banking.

Such a phrase may evoke images of drug dealers, money launderers and corrupted officials. And, indeed, states have long been concerned about the potential utilisation of these networks for crime and terrorist financing. But numerous scholars have pushed back against this securitised narrative.

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Maria Popova at The Marginalian:

One of the 35 girls among the 2,000 students at Mexico’s National Preparatory School, Frida Kahlo (July 6, 1907–July 13, 1954) was fifteen when she met Alejandro Gómez Arias. Both were passionate and erudite, both were members of the anarchist student group known as Los Cachuchas for the pointed cloth caps they wore in defiance of the era’s restrictive dress code, both became each other’s first love. Alejandro was on the bus with Frida that fateful late-summer day shortly after her eighteenth birthday when a tram collision killed several other passengers and left her so severely injured — her pelvis fractured, her stomach and uterus punctured by a rail, her spine broken in three places and her leg in eleven — that the doctors at the Red Cross Hospital did not think she could be saved. It was Alejandro’s unrelenting insistence that made them try. Against all odds, Frida lived — but her life was irrevocably changed. How she coped with what she had to live through in turn changed the history of art.

Her letters to Alejandro, collected in the altogether stirring volume Frida Kahlo: Love Letters (public library) edited by Suzanne Barbezat, offer a rare glimpse of her becoming — as an artist, as a lover, as a person who lived with extraordinary vulnerability, extraordinary courage, and the precocious awareness that the conversation between the two is the measure of a life.

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Quing Zhu in The Conversation:

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Andrew Macintosh in Nature:

It is a dark time for climate policy and global affairs. Wars in Ukraine, the Gaza Strip and now Iran, as well as the domestic and international policy and trade agendas of US President Donald Trump’s administration, are diverting attention from efforts to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. Momentum for mitigating climate change is now in retreat, as it was after the 2008 global financial crisis. Economist Nicholas Stern pushes against that tide in his latest book. The Growth Story of the 21st Century is drawn from lectures at the London School of Economics in 2024 and builds on his earlier works in an attempt to reinvigorate worldwide efforts to limit global warming.

Stern’s 2006 report for the UK government, The Economics of Climate Change, is arguably the most influential work on that topic, both because of its content and the fierce debate that it prompted. The report, and his 2016 book Why Are We Waiting?, pushed the case for immediate and aggressive efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, based mostly on the argument that it is cheaper to decarbonize than it is to deal with the potentially catastrophic costs of climate change.

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Rachel Ossip at n+1:

In 1967, in the heart of Manhattan’s theater district, my grandfather Jerry opened a steakhouse. The Cattle Baron took the energy of a theme restaurant and gave it an adult polish. Red and white tablecloths, quilted wall panels, dark wood accents, and uplight chandeliers accented the red brick walls, while waitstaff appeared in “Western attire.” The following year, advertisements in Playbill and the New York Post implored eaters to “Break the Dull Steak House Habit” by patronizing Jerry Ossip’s Cattle Baron. “We looked around at the steak house scene. And we found it dreary,” the ad proclaimed. “We opened up the Cattle Baron for you men (and your women) who hunger for the best steak in town—and something else, besides.”

The real draw sat just above these words: a black-and-white image of a woman kneeling naked in a Stetson, glancing seductively over her shoulder. Her body is portioned out with painted lines, each segment labeled as a cut: chuck, rib, loin, rump, soup bone, and so on.

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Wolfgang Streeck in Sidecar:

The Israeli-American war against Iran has thrown financial markets into turmoil and there is growing concern across national economies. Does this remind you of the oil price shock of the 1970s?

Not very much. Back then, it was all still relatively manageable: not much more than a producers’ cartel in the Middle East. Today, thanks to fracking the United States is energy self-sufficient and can afford any kind of madness, including the systematic destruction of energy infrastructure not only in Iran but across the Gulf states – and, as a bonus, the destruction of Iranian society. By contrast, in the 1970s Nixon and Kissinger were preparing for rapprochement with China, while in Germany the Brandt government was turning to a policy of détente, which contributed to the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc two decades later.

Could the war against Iran turn out to be the biggest mistake of Trump’s presidency? He evidently underestimated the potential for escalation.

The Americans always do – they don’t need Trump for that. Look at Biden in Ukraine, and in his wake the Europeans who allowed themselves to be convinced that the war would be over in a few months (the Russians, incidentally, believed something similar). The EU has now taken over the Ukraine war and insists that it must continue, even though the Americans have lost interest and the Russians have, by and large, already won. Why? Presumably because they do not want to admit that they ‘underestimated the potential for escalation’ as you put it. But it could also be that they anticipate technological and economic benefits, as well as greater internal cohesion, from a war others are fighting for them.

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Sarah Miller-Davenport in The Ideas Letter:

The most facile assessments of Zohran Mamdani’s extraordinary campaign to lead New York City attribute its success to his innovative use of social media and a communication style that appealed to voters with TikTok accounts. But often lost in the narrative of his historic win—inevitably reduced to his age and the novelty of a democratic socialist mayor—is the long tradition of progressive urban policy that his platform evoked. Mamdani’s agenda seeks to disinter, if not fully revive, New Deal–era New York. In doing so, it promises to finally shake the albatross of the city’s 1975 fiscal crisis.

As the general campaign intensified, Mamdani’s team launched a series of videos under the banner “Until It’s Done,” a phrase borrowed from Nelson Mandela. Each began with the solemn-faced candidate striding into frame and sitting behind an antique wooden desk placed in the middle of a sidewalk or public park. For those closely attuned to the semiotics of the Mamdani campaign’s near-constant video drops, you knew you were in for a history lesson. In the final entry in the series, Mamdani celebrated the political career of Vito Marcantonio, the seven-term socialist congressman from East Harlem and a mentee of Fiorello La Guardia, a mayor who had championed labor and civil rights. Posted on the eve of Election Day, the video urged voters, “we need look only to our past for proof of how socialism can shape our future.”

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Lindsay Beyerstein in Dissent:

Jeffrey Epstein checks every conspiracist box. The late sex trafficker was a Jewish financier linked to the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations. His influence extended to the House of Saud, the House of Windsor, the Russian Federation, and Israel. He liked pizza. Renewed attention to the astonishing number of prominent men cultivated by Epstein has poured fuel on simmering conspiracy theories of shadowy child trafficking rings run by powerful elites. As Ana Marie Cox observed in the New Republic, “every new file drop brings at least a whisper of validation to QAnon’s core contentions.” Even some serious-minded observers are willing to entertain increasingly outlandish claims. Tara Palmeri, one of the most prominent journalists on the Epstein beat, even suggested that Epstein might have been growing mind-control plants in his garden to turn his victims into zombies.

As a result, in February former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton found herself fielding questions about Pizzagate and UFOs when she testified before Congress about her nonexistent relationship with Epstein. Beginning in the 2016 presidential election, peddlers of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which laid the groundwork for QAnon, held that Clinton and other high-ranking Democrats were trafficking children from the basement of a beloved family restaurant in Washington, D.C. that has no basement.

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